The immortality of Microsoft Word(theredline.versionstory.com) |
The immortality of Microsoft Word(theredline.versionstory.com) |
Well, yes, but the binary blob is a zip archive of a directory of text XML files, and one could imagine tooling that wraps the git interaction in an unzip/zip bracket.
The real problem is that lawyers, like basically all other non-programmers, neither know nor care about the sequence of bytes that makes a file in the minds of programmers. In their minds the file IS what they see when they open it in word: a sequence of white rectangles with text laid out on it in specific ways, including tables with borders, etc. The fact that a lot of really complicated stuff goes on inside the file to get the WYSIWYG rendering is not only irrelevant to them, it's unknown.
Maybe the answer here will be along the lines of Karpathy's musings about making LLMs work directly with pixels (images of text), instead of encoded text and tokenizers [1]. An AI tool would take the document visually-standard legal document form, and read it, and produce output with edits, redlines, etc as directed by the user.
The diff of the document (referred to as a "redline") is what lawyers send to the client and their counterparties. It's essential that the redline is legible for all parties and reflects their professionalism.
Moreover, it is not enough to see the structural changes between the versions. A lawyer needs to see the formatting changes between the versions as well which cannot be accomplished by diffing XML files.
If openxml can be converted to csv/similar perhaps which can be converted to recutils
Recutils supports both mdb (Microsoft Access database files)/csv files to/from recutils
I saw this project on a recent hackernews comment and I had seen some comments there about how it does / can work decently with git features iirc (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46265811)
I am interested to hear what your thoughts on recutils are and if perhaps we can have microsoft word/similar to git+recutils like workflow maybe
I thought about it and a tar/zipped git folder which can contain images/other content too which can be referenced with recutils instead of openxml/word document to me does feel an interesting idea
I am not sure but I think that openxml directly embeds data like pictures which can defnitely make it hard for git software to work perhaps but basically I am interested what you think about this/any feedback
At the start of the project the Markdown is authoritative, and the DOCX is just for previewing the styling. (Pandoc can insert the text into a layout template with place holders.)
Towards the end of a project I'll start treating the DOCX as authoritative but continue generating Markdown from it, so I can run the AI over it as a final proof-read or whatever.
This is similar to what people used to do with DocBook, but with a more friendly text format and a more AI-friendly "modern" workflow with Git, etc...
Maybe one day there'll be a product to replace Word, but it won't succeed by claiming to be a generalist replacement but only as a niche product that solves a particularly painful problem for lawyers and then expands over time to capture more use cases.
Yeah, I know that sounds fake-deep but we've seen this before; I'm old enough to remember when WordPerfect was the standard that wasn't going anywhere.
It will just be one of those inflection-point thingies.
I do regret being overly paranoid in my 20s and not writing down my master passphrase to my personal documents -- I lost a huge chunk of diaries and writings due to that.
Fun fact: ODT uses Blowfish encryptio. Remember when we made Bruce Schnierer a meme like Chuck Norris? He wrote it -- apparently it's faster than AES?
Anyways, if you save with password in a .ODT file, if you pick a strong password you've got a nice little self contained encrypted volume that doesn't require "suspicious" software to open.
ANYWAYS, a bit of a tangent but... looking forward to death of Word.
The legal industry also uses MD5 to certify digital evidence hasn't been tampered with, that too will eventually bite them in the ass.
I've seen too many things that seemed to be around forever eventually disappear to believe in the permanence of Word.
I'm a lawyer, though I'm practicing in a wholly different legal system (Romanic civil law) and another country. Why would you say that?
No issues against .docx and and Word per se, but I hate that stupid ribbon with undying hatred. Thus I use LibreOffice as much as I can, while maintaining a licensed Office 365 setup under dual boot with Windows for cases when I have no other choice.
Curious what the top 3 features are that are missing. The article only mentions multi-level decimal clause numbering (e.g. 9.1.2). Seems like it would be a very easy feature to add. I've heard that line numbering is also a big legal thing, but Docs already has that.
Sources of standard: http://www.ada-auth.org/arm-files/2022-SRC.zip
Format tool can be found here: http://www.ada-auth.org/arm.html#Format_Tool
Sample output with edits: http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/22aarm/html/AA-5-2.html
Red color is for Ada 2012 -> Ada 2012 TC1 diff, green color is for Ada 2012 TC1 -> Ada 2022 diff.
As an attorney, this is what kept me from switching to LibreOffice or Google Docs. I gave it a shot, but since the other attorneys I work with (both in and outside the US) and my clients all use Word, I ended up wasting a lot of time fixing files after converting between formats. In the end, it just wasn’t worth it.
I’m fairly tech-savvy, but many of my coworkers struggle with the mental effort required to switch to new software. Two colleagues I greatly respect still use WordPerfect and Word 2003 because they dislike change so much. It's too much of a lift for these people to wholesale switch word processors.
Opaque blobs like docx are not suitable for applications where the content of the document has to be completely clear to the various competing parties involved in something like a contract. It only works because the document gets printed out and then signed with a pen. If we want to move past that we need something different.
That's PDF. PDFs are for the final work product. Word is for the work in progress.
I wonder if M/S got that "fixed", early on they had a hard time with it.
It's a bad format for the imaginary problem but it shows that government action can actually force a change in workflows in the legal profession.
Akoma Ntoso has been pushed onto legislative bodies and by extension onto most of the legal profession in the EU and in many 3rd world countries. It does not solve the diff problem but it kind of solves the machine-readable storage of laws.
https://open.substack.com/pub/versionstory/p/on-the-immortal...
Nonetheless, agree with the author that I don't see anything disturbing Word in that space for a long time, as good luck trying to get a middle-aged with minimal tech understanding to learn and use LaTeX over Word.
I write a lot more about it in an earlier essay, "On Building Git for Lawyers."
https://theredline.versionstory.com/p/on-building-git-for-la...
The OP may be exaggerating a bit (it's marketing for their startup after all), but I'd expect that if you want to develop a product for a certain market, researching how the customers in that market operate and what their technical constraints are would be one of the first things to do.
Obviously, random people on Twitter won't do this, but here there seem to be entire companies that expect the whole legal system to move into their proprietary cloud. How did they imagine this would work?
I believe this is not only infuriating, I am pretty sure it is actually illegal. If lawyers would think that visuals are more important than semantics, they would explicitly discriminate blind people.
I never claimed that it was more important than semantics. But it is, nonetheless, essential.
It's also painful in a different way than LaTeX. While LaTeX is complex but deterministic, Word just eludes your efforts in a way that does not build a coherent mental model but rather a loose set of fuzzy rules learned via frustration.
I deeply believe that this was by design and is in general part of Microsoft culture, creating a separation between programmers and users to make them suffer in their own ways. No wonder Bill Gates became a philanthropist in his later years. He knows better than anyone that future historians will figure out all the evil he expertly inflicted on the world.
- Small caps, no problem. - Multilevel heading numbering, no problem - Table of Authority, no problem - Line numbers, no problem. - Paragraph numbers, no problem. - For missing features the community is more than capable of providing extensions to fill the gap. Redlining would be an example.
A LaTeX or Typst document can contain both the content and formatting together within the same file. This isn't idiomatic for either language, and my experience is that this is more common for Typst than LaTeX, but both can do so. All of those formatting rules like small caps, table widths, margins, page numbering, etc.? Those can be rigidly defined in either LaTeX or Typst and are better guarded aginst accidental formatting rules breaches from double click, copy/paste, or table cell insertion than in Word.
I'm more sympathetic to the network effect argument. It's hard to envision a reasonable redline system compatible with both Docx and LaTeX/Typst.
On the Google Docs front — I wrote specifically about its viability as a Word successor in an earlier post, "Why Lawyers Will Never Use Google Docs".
https://theredline.versionstory.com/p/why-lawyers-will-never...
It's depressing to read about Word's entrenchment. This entire once-great application is now an execrable mess, with menus scattered under cryptic buttons (and abridged into dumbed-down menus that require you to expose yet another, collapsed one to access essential, frequently-used functions), a file... thing (not even a dialog, let alone a proper File dialog) that shows you a canned list of locations in a UI that appears to consist only of text...
The style-handling is even messed up, once one of Word's great strengths.
Google offers so many things free out of the box. And for serious spreadsheet sort of work, I use numpy.
Google pretty much won the Office software war.
Just not in any of the biggest markets for office software, like the legal industry, and government.
That's a "citation needed" if ever there was one.
So was 2010 or 2011 the Year of the Linux Desktop?
So, an analogous "Word-killer" today would presumably have to implement all of the docx format's weird quirks etc. On the one hand, the file format is standardized and open, so in principle that should be possible; on the other hand, it's a pretty gnarly file format, with a lot of nooks and crannies. Ironically, I remember hearing once that some of the weirder nooks and crannies of the docx format have their roots in... Word's WordPerfect interoperability features.
And as somebody who recently spent far more time than he expected to trying to reliably get data _out_ of a set of mildly-complicated docx files, I can report that the various fiddly details that the OP notes as being particularly important in the legal domain --- very specific details of paragraph formatting, complex table structures, etc. --- are a huge PITA to deal with when working with the docx format.
For a competitor to supplant Word, it would need to:
- Be fully backwards compatible with .docx. Lawyers will inevitably receive .docx files from counterparties that they need to review, redline, and mark up. The new processor has to handle everything Word does flawlessly. (As an engineer who has spent considerable time building a high-quality docx comparison engine, I can tell you this is tremendously difficult.)
- If it introduces a new file format, support seamless comparison and conversion between that format and .docx. Not technically impossible, but also tremendously difficult with marginal upside.
- Defeat the Microsoft Office bundle in the market — meaning it either offers enough advantage that organizations pay for both, or it replaces Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook too.
Given the enormous challenge of building a viable Word competitor and the marginal room for improvement that Microsoft has left on the table, I think it's very unlikely that a competitor will threaten its market position.
The stated intent of the US National Security Strategy is to destabilise and undermine Europe. That is a big incentive for European organisations to replace Windows, Office, and any other Microsoft service.
Linux and LibreOffice usage will grow as a direct consequence of the US government's new antipathy to Europe.
1. Fund a home grown alternative. Spend millions of Euros all the while fighting off a barrage of complaints that EUWord doesnt do things, costs too much, is burning taxes and productivity, etc.
2. Spend a nominal sum, but kick the project into the long grass, and hope that the US retreats from its stance back to the norm. "Maybe Word will be ok in 2027 after midterms, right? or 2029? Maybe I stick my fingers in my ears and tough it out"
2. is realistically what most politicians would do. Making tough, really difficult decisions is not something they like to do.
Cite, please?
It runs on-premise, has all kinds of certificates and has a history of half a cenutry (give or take.) That kills Google Docs.
It's cross-paltform, killing whatever Apple thinks it has.
Too many people think Word is a text editor. I'd use Notepad++ if it had full AD integration. But it doesnt.
They'll be paying long beyond on-prem AD as well. EntraID is becoming the new identity system. If you're already on E3/E5, you might as well make use of it, and making most use of it means being stuck in the whole Microsoft ecosystem.
Why bother looking for alternatives, even if one particular product might be better, when Microsoft gives you literally everything at at least a mediocre level, for one price and pre-integrated.
It's looking like Windows will be more of an issue here than anything in Office. But either way they can only push people so far.
https://theredline.versionstory.com/p/why-lawyers-will-never...
The short answer is Google Docs:
- Requires all-or-nothing adoption which is a non-starter for law-firms
- Does not support commit atomicity
- Does not store a comprehensive history of the document
Files are also easily shared (on physical media, email, no need for anyone to have a Google account to edit and send them back), encrypted, burned onto a CD for storage. DOC/DOCX are ubiquitous and stable file formats. No worries about data leaks in the cloud as it's all local by default...
So as far as formatting goes, it seems like it's only list formatting and small caps you've identified, am I missing anything else? (I am baffled by Docs' refusal to add small caps.)
But then as far as workflow is concerned, I'm not sure Docs is as unusable as you say it is -- the commit atomicity and comprehensive history aren't supported by Word either, are they? That's just a function of maintaining 20 separate copies of the file with each set of changes. You can still do that with Docs if you want to, rather than relying on the version history. And then "Tools > Compare documents" lets you merge in all the changes from another document, in an atomic way if you want. And if you want to use the revision history in a "master" version, you can used named versions as well.
Yes, everybody at the firm needs to use Docs. That's not unique to law -- every company that switches from MS365 to Google makes that kind of overnight transition, but it makes sense because you're paying one company or the other, not both.
It's the communication between firms that is going to be stuck in .docx basically forever though, so this is where Google needs to improve its conversion. Ideally Google would also build a "send a copy/transfer" feature so a firm can receive a Google Doc but know that from the moment it "opens" it, a new copy is made on their local Drive so the sending firm never sees edits or activity. But because that feels like it would be too easy to mess up, I think actual .docx file attachments will themselves be immortal, even if both sides used Docs.
Not superbly important for signed documents. Everyone has their own copy in multiple places, including their inboxes. At the end of the day that chain of custody and corroboration is more valuable than a digital signature.
And be compatible with docx. The pedanticly-correct title for this article would be the immortality of docx.
>>So was 2010 or 2011 the Year of the Linux Desktop?
Desktops are the of the game of the past. Mobile devices is what you need to look at.
Windows doesn't even have a presence there.
So yes, Linux won!
https://theredline.versionstory.com/p/on-building-git-for-la...
Wouldn't the obvious solution then be to take the tool they already use for redlining (e.g. Word's compare function) and integrate it into a git workflow?
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12356917/how-to-set-diff...
I do find the ribbon somehow weirdly intuitive for navigating with the keyboard, but it was of course possible to navigate drop-down menus in the exact same way (Alt and a series of underlined letters) for years before that. And still is... When developers bother to write robust software.
On the rare occasions when I'm forced to use Word, I find it an incomprehensible mess. I don't understand why users continue to tolerate it.
There is other software: LibreOffice and SoftMaker Office are close enough to be familiar to any casual user, and WordPerfect was always an excellent word processor!
Some comments above focus on legal docs. I've provided support to practicing lawyers. They don't have time to learn new tools that maybe support the majority of what they need because people on this site know there are alternatives. They're locked into Word so that they can focus on the part of their work for which they are trained and it's not software like you or me.
Ctrl-o? Selects the Home menu.
Followed by 'e'? Deselects the Home menu, and presents the "Select Case" subwindow... like it did when it was on the Format menu, which no longer exists.
Documentation for this? Um, well...
For a similar reason, faxes will never die out in the US, because the legal industry requires them.
This is exactly why we switched from Zoom to Teams
Or just learn from the experience of others:
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Austria-s-armed-forces-switch-t...
This stuff can be done and already has been done in some places.
> However, a longer, unpublished draft of the document was circulated prior to the official, public strategy. It reportedly goes into more detail about the plans the US has in store for Europe. According to the Washington-based digital media platform Defense One, which claims to have seen the draft, it lists Italy, Austria, Poland and Hungary as countries that the US should "work more with … with the goal of pulling them away" from the European Union.The White House has denied the existence of any such draft.
https://www.dw.com/en/will-trump-pull-italy-austria-poland-h...
Despite the WH claims it seems to have been generally accepted as true already in Europe; Germany's chancellor has commented publicly on it.
Discussion:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/breaking-down-trumps-2025...
https://www.chathamhouse.org/2025/12/trumps-new-national-sec...
The points on Europe are:
> Our broad policy for Europe should prioritize:
> • Reestablishing conditions of stability within Europe and strategic stability with Russia;
> • Enabling Europe to stand on its own feet and operate as a group of aligned sovereign nations, including by taking primary responsibility for its own defense, without being dominated by any adversarial power;
> • Cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations;
> • Opening European markets to U.S. goods and services and ensuring fair treatment of U.S. workers and businesses;
> • Building up the healthy nations of Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe through commercial ties, weapons sales, political collaboration, and cultural and educational exchanges;
> • Ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance; and
> • Encouraging Europe to take action to combat mercantilist overcapacity, technological theft, cyber espionage, and other hostile economic practices
This is aligned with what Russia wants. Russia has cultivated Trump as an ally and it appears to be working.
The US is explicit in its intention to meddle with and undermine Europe by "cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations" and celebrates "the growing influence of patriotic European parties" (i.e. authoritarian, right-wing parties like AfD).
The US is explicitly attempting to annex European territory. Trump says the US will take Greenland "one way or the other". The US has been caught running an influence campaign in Greenland trying to promote its secession from Denmark: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0j9l08902eo
Given American's new direction, de-Americanising your infrastructure and supply chains makes sense. It's sensible risk reduction.
And even then, Microsoft will be happy because even if Windows were to dissappear tomorrow, people would still be buying Microsoft 365 licenses and just using the very same tech and app stack from their mac.
That was my hunch, too. Okay, but which features, that only are in Word but not on other products?
Which I see this "suite numerique" integrates as well.
It's somewhat analogous to how coders use add-ins in their IDE but if only one IDE could run them.
The productivity boost you get from having a consistent environment is insane. You never need to care about the ribbon, your documents look good, and your mouse/keyboard ergonomics are wonderful with a good normal.dot.
It's like people who have their vimrc or emacs config down to a fine art.
Sure, you could, but that defeats the purpose of Google Docs which is to make the document collaborative. If you save each iteration in a different Doc, you might as well use Word.
It would also add friction to the workflow because a lawyer would need to download the document from Google Docs whenever they circulate it to a client or counterparty.
The best solution to the problem, in my opinion, is a docx native version control system. I write about how that works in our product Version Story in "On Building Git for Lawyers."
https://theredline.versionstory.com/p/on-building-git-for-la...
Funnily enough, that's how I (and a lot of people I know) use Google Docs.
The version history is great if you accidentally delete something and want to go back, but I don't know anyone who relies on the version history as a kind of meaningful archive -- it's just too fragile. Unless you create named versions, changes get collapsed, and when you make a copy, the version history doesn't get copied.
And it doesn't prevent collaboration -- multiple people can still collaborate on one set of changes in one "branch" file, while other people can collabroate on another set of changes in another "branch" file. When collaboration is done on both, they can get merged into the master file.
You've definitely convinced me that Docs doesn't work for law firms, but mainly for other reasons. Using multiple versions of files doesn't defeat the purpose of Docs -- it still makes collaboration much easier, and nobody's stuck e-mailing files back and forth that are out-of-date by the time they're opened.
Your idea of a VCS for .docx is intriguing though. Good luck!